Why Apple Will Win The Augmented Reality Race

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Guest post written by

Michael Park

Michael Park is the founder and CEO of PostAR, an augmented reality startup.

Apple CEO Tim Cook (Credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images)

Tim Cook is betting big on augmented reality (AR). The Apple chief executive officer has been publicly bullish about the technology, which overlays digital imagery onto the real world. He has likened the disruptive potential of AR to that of the smartphone upon which Apple has built its $800 billion business. Although analysts do not expect mass consumer adoption for years, Cook has said that AR will eventually become as ubiquitous as “eating three meals a day.”

Apple has revealed several auspicious AR developments in recent months. In June, the company launched ARKit, an open-source platform that lets developers build AR applications for iPhones and iPads. The technology behind ARKit combines computer vision, tracking sensors and mapping software, a mixture that is used by the wildly popular AR smartphone game Pokémon Go, and Snapchat, the social media platform.

Apple is also rumored to be developing several AR hardware products, including “smart glasses” that could connect wirelessly to a smartphone and beam AR content such as maps and movies to consumers. Apple is also said to be placing 3D sensors into the dual-camera system in its upcoming iPhone 8, which would enable more sophisticated AR capabilities than are readily available with current camera technology.

It’s the right time for Apple to invest in AR. Research firm Global Market Insights predicts that the global market for AR products will surge by 80% to $165 billion by 2024. While other tech titans like Facebook and Google are developing virtual reality (VR) headsets, which offer full immersion in virtual worlds, Cook believes AR will be a bigger opportunity because it is less intrusive. Few people want to be “enclosed in something,” he explained last year. VR headsets have been more of a niche product than a mainstream device so far. CCS Insight, a technology research group, says sales have fallen 40% behind initial forecasts.

The challenge for Apple will be overcoming its neighbors in Silicon Valley. Google released its AR platform, Tango, some three years before Apple, in 2014. The technology uses infrared depth perception sensors to create a 3D map of a smartphone user’s surrounding—useful for games and advertising. However, because Apple can easily pair its software and devices, it has a distinct advantage over the competition, despite being characteristically late to the game.

Apple owns an integrated hardware and software ecosystem necessary to power AR applications. This gives Apple control over what, when and how software is loaded onto the 41 million smartphone units it sells each quarter. Analysts predict that when Apple updates iOS later in 2017, the company could load AR software onto as many as one billion mobile devices that currently run on iOS.

Although some older models will not be compatible with the new operating system, this still gives Apple a massive, near-instantaneous market for AR apps. Apple is already sizing up the enterprise market; working with companies including Ikea, the Scandinavian retailer known for flat pack furniture, to develop AR content through its ARKit platform.

Google does not have this same advantage, even though it controls Android, the most widely-used operating system in the world. Fewer than 13.5% of Android devices currently run on the newest Android operating system, partly because hardware makers and mobile network operators are slow to update Android mobile devices. Comparatively, 87% of Apple’s mobile devices use the latest iOS software.

Google’s task is complicated further by the fact that there are seven different versions of Android running on mobile devices. This makes the challenge of developing AR apps more difficult because developers would need to test and optimize the apps for different versions of Android, and on the many different devices that use the operating system (as of 2015, there were 24,000). Apple, on the other hand, designs hardware and software into just a few devices. This will result in a much more seamless AR user experience, particularly for multi-user applications such as massively multiplayer games.

It’s worth noting here that Pokémon GO, the first mass-scale multiplayer AR gaming experience, succeeded on both Android and iOS devices at a global scale. However, it can be argued that Pokémon GO isn’t a genuine augmented reality application. The application and resulting gameplay don’t actually comprehend the user’s local environment and playspace. This results in frequent glitches in the game, particularly in regards to the scale of the object in frame. For example, a Krabby might appear to be the size of a baseball stadium. A Squirtle may randomly float in space and walk through the air, without any regard for actual planes or surfaces upon which it should be interacting in the real world.

A more authentic AR experience would actually have the animal interacting with objects in your environment. If it walked into a wall, it would bounce off and retreat. If it walked off of a tabletop, it would fall to the ground, wince, and spring back up. Since none of these things are possible in the current iteration of Pokémon GO, the application is really more like an evolved version of FourSquare with cartoon monsters that pop up in random locations. To make a next generation massively multiplayer game with characters that interact with the environment, a more robust and integrated ecosystem is required.

This hardware and software integration needs to incorporate elements of machine learning, computer vision, and 3D depth sensing to comprehend the dimensions of a user’s local playspace. Moreover, to do this at scale in a multi-user or multiplayer manner, different AR smartphones will need to communicate with each other and make sense of what is happening in the same space, in real time. With its “closed garden” approach to hardware and software integration, Apple has a strong competitive advantage from the start. In contrast, Google’s fragmented ecosystem will only make it harder for them to compete at scale.

ARKit is a springboard that Apple will use for a much larger push into AR. However, Cook has kept his cards close to his chest about his specific plans for the medium. It would make sense to begin with the iPhone—it is a mass-market device and, with the introduction of ARKit, much of the heavy lifting for building AR apps has been removed for iOS development teams.

Introducing AR into a billion smartphones would also give Apple the opportunity to learn about user behavior and experience. The company could then use that insight to build a long-term plan for its rumored "Apple Glasses." Apple is methodically laying the groundwork for a closed ecosystem of hardware, software, developers, tools, and consumers—in typical Apple fashion.